migration

Our trip along the storied Montezuma wildlife drive in upstate New York had been all but devoid of birds the first hour. Then we turned the corner at the halfway mark and came upon a scene that instantly made up for the quiet start.

Two dozen Great Egrets stood clustered in a shallow pond as if in a ballet rehearsal. They moved along in groups of threes and fours in precise formation. With their long thin necks lining up one minute and crisscrossing the next, they seemed choreographed for elegance.

Great Egrets are such compelling birds to watch – and they don’t seem to mind an audience that keeps its distance. Much of the time, they prefer to forage alone, researchers say. But they will come together in small groups when there’s plenty of fish. From time to time, they’ll form big flocks like the one we came upon at Montezuma.

They aren’t hard to find all across the wetlands in the United States. Although hunted nearly to extinction during the feathered-hat craze of the late 1900s, migratory protection laws have helped Great Egrets become one of the strongest wading bird species today.

They’re flexible and adaptable, enabling them to adjust to the habitat loss that has undermined other species. The North American Waterbird Conservation survey estimates that there are 180,000 breeding Egrets in the U.S.

The egret’s green eyes in breeding season

They stand out in marshes and coastal areas — sheer white, with yellow beaks, long dark legs and a wingspan of almost 5 feet. During the spring breeding season, the area around their eyes turns lime-green, a striking accent that signals their readiness for mating.

The statistics for Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are almost as stunning as a close-up look at their iridescent plumage.

Zeroing in on the male hummingbird

Their wings can flap up to 80 times a second. They weigh about 3 grams – a wisp of a bird at a tenth of an ounce. They can go from breakneck speed to a full stop in an instant.

And when they do hang suspended in midair, their wings a blur of motion, the sight is one of nature’s most precious moments. It evaporates as suddenly as it appears, making the encounters all the more intriguing.

The Ruby-throated is one of 300 hummingbird species worldwide, only a few dozen of which are in the U.S. and Canada. The Ruby-throated Hummingbird is the single species found in the Eastern United States, but it’s plentiful and not particularly shy. So these spectacular hummingbirds are not hard to spot, particularly this time of year.

In late summer, as the hummingbirds are preparing to migrate halfway across the hemisphere, they are in the midst of a feeding frenzy to bulk up for the journey. They consume their entire weight in nectar each day, which the Audubon Society calculated was the equivalent of a human drinking 18 gallons of milk.

As photos of migrating birds popped up on a big screen last night, a couple dozen birders from the Audubon Society of Northern Virginia sat in a conference room at the National Wildlife Federation headquarters taking careful notes. Saturday is World Migratory Bird Day, and these folks were getting their marching orders.

Starting at dawn they’ll form teams and scour nearby “Important Bird Areas,” counting species to help evaluate how this year’s migrating birds have fared on the flight across thousands of miles to their breeding grounds. Here are some of what they’re likely to see in a gallery of photos Anders has taken from our recent migration trip (run your cursor over the pictures for their species).

Blue Grosbeak

Baltimore Oriole

Cape May Warbler

Scarlet Tanager

Eastern Meadowlark

Male Orchard Oriole

Female Orchard Oriole

Blackburnian Warbler

Bird counts are mostly for the hardcore. But if you’re at all interested in birds, if you’re tuning into this spring’s tweet-and-twitter symphony as you move through your day, if you wonder what it’s all about, tomorrow is a great time to learn more.

Love can be dangerous. We know it. And yet, there are times when this most elemental of emotions pushes you beyond all reason.

Why else would an otherwise elusive, tiny yellow bird end up walking down the middle of the road in broad daylight? It was a gorgeous spring day, and this Yellow-throated Warbler was drunk in love.

Typically Yellow-throated Warblers are so difficult to find that they’ve hardly been studied. They spend most of their lives hidden, conducting all of their daily activities behind the leaves of trees some 200 feet tall.

And yet…there he was, hopping down the road in mid-May at the Pokomoke River State Park on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Anders and I had just finished a long birding hike through the forest, heading back to build a fire and call it a day. Out of the corner of my eye there was a suddenly a splash of lemony yellow where it wasn’t supposed to be.

A jolt of something akin to electricity shot down the backs of my legs as I realized what was happening. I dug my fingernails into my husband’s arm and pointed, resisting the urge to jump up and down.

Then all I could do was stand by and watch, holding my breath to see if Anders could move fast enough to get the photo.

Around the world, all sorts of efforts are in the works to protect the many bird species now in decline. This week, in an article for the Washington Post, we take a deep look at one of them: the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird project and its innovative way of researching the daily life of birds.

We hope you’ll take a look at our piece, which you can find here online and is the cover story of the Post’s Health and Science section on Tuesday.

An eBird map charting the Bald Eagle’s travels over the year

The eBird project stands out in several fascinating ways: it’s now the world’s most successful citizen science effort. The project is also the scientific foundation for numerous studies on the status of modern birds, and it’s helping reshape how conservation is conducted. This is is a big part of what our Post story explores.

What’s most interesting to us is how the technology behind eBird does all of this as it’s become a valuable tool to help individuals identify the birds they see and keep track of their own birding lists. At last count, 462,000 people around the world are using the eBird app.

Jerry Lorenz, Florida’s leading expert on the Roseate Spoonbill, kept hearing about a new nesting ground in Central Florida named for the nearby town of Stick Marsh. So he decided to see for himself what was happening on the string of small inland islands where dozens of the state’s most elegant bird had set up living quarters.

Audubon research director Jerry Lorenz / photo by Mac Stone

“They told me, ‘We think there’s probably 25 or 30 nests.’ But I sat there on the shoreline and counted,” said Lorenz, state research director for the Audubon Society in Florida and professor at Florida International University. “There were at least 150 nests there.”

A Spoonbill in full breeding allure balances on a Stick Marsh branch

A surprising and encouraging trend is under way with the Spoonbills, a striking specimen with deep pink and red coloring and a frame that harkens back to its dinosaur origins. As changes in water levels and habitat play out in Florida, this is one bird whose numbers and range have steadily expanded.

The Spoonbill is thriving at least partly as a result of the climate trends that are working against many species. The rising water and temperatures have forced the Spoonbill to move north, expand its reach and find new sources of food. Lorenz believes that the population of one of Florida’s emblematic birds has never been higher in modern times. Across, Florida, he estimates their numbers at 3,500 to 4,000; though not a huge number, it’s many times what it was at the turn of the century when the Spoonbills feathers were so popular hunters almost wiped them out entirely.

As water levels have risen in coastal nesting places, the Spoonbills have looked elsewhere to find the unique environment they need. That in turn has helped them to spread their reach beyond heavily developed South Florida and the Everglades that had been their primary Florida breeding grounds for decades.

They’ve found inland nesting locations such as Stick Marsh and Merritt Island in Central Florida. They’ve moved into other southeastern states, including Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and the Carolinas. As they’ve scouted new locations, Spoonbill have showed up as far away as Minnesota and New England, though they aren’t expected to put down roots that far afield.

Wood Stork chick

Great Egret chick

Sandhill Crane

Anhinga chick

You can sometimes hear them before you see them: Sweet but incessant cries of early life, calling for food, warmth, attention. If you’re lucky — and in the right place — you get a look at the first chicks of the season, which can be found all across Florida this month where the warm temperatures get the breeding season off to an early start.

The photos above, (from left to right), include a weeks-old Wood Stork, a Great Egret so new its feathers are nothing but fuzz, a Sandhill Crane already up and walking and a very young Anhinga, calling for food.

A Great Egret carries a branch to its nest

We spent the past six weeks roaming Florida on a spring-time birding trip. The nesting and breeding season is still many weeks away farther north, but here it’s in full swing for large coastal birds. You can see Egrets and Herons hauling sticks and branches across the marshes, and Wood Storks in the midst of their mating rituals. We witnessed the first generation of Anhingas, Cormorants and other new hatchlings in the nest, then perking up, and finally standing, walking and attempting to fly.

Audubon’s annual Nebraska Crane Festival starts today, where 80 percent of the world’s cranes are converging on one 80-mile stretch of land. More than half a million Sandhill Cranes will touch down in central Nebraska this spring to fatten up before migrating north to their breeding grounds.

Florida is home to a sub-species of Sandhill Crane that never migrates.While their cousins in other parts of the U.S. are so skittish they’d never stay still for a photo, Florida’s cranes are urban birds unafraid of people.

There may be tens of thousands of Sandhill Cranes near Kearney, Nebraska, for the festival this week, but to see one up close you’d have to hide behind a bird blind. If you’re in Florida, like Anders and I are for a winter birding trip, the crazy cranes are grazing on golf courses, standing in people’s front yards and walking alongside major roadways without showing a care in the world.

Because Florida’s suitable crane habitat has been shrinking for years, these native birds have grown accustomed to sharing space with humans. (Sandhill Cranes can live up to 35 years and mate for life.) State law forbids feeding cranes, but it’s not unusual for them to walk right up to your car hoping for a handout.

You’re not likely to forget a close encounter with a Sandhill Crane. Statuesque at 4 feet tall, with leathery crimson skin on their faces and gray-and-brown feathers that fan out at the hips like a skirt, these birds are astonishing. Cranes are among the world’s oldest living birds and one of the planet’s most successful life forms, having outlasted millions of species. The Sandhill Cranes of North America have not changed appreciably in ten million years.

In the reeds where it likes to forage for food, the Purple Gallinule stands out like a beauty contestant.

With shimmering purple and turquoise feathers, a distinctive red-and-yellow beak, a white patch on its face and bright yellow legs, this “Purple Gal” knows how to entertain a crowd. She struts slowly through the wetlands, giving you plenty of time to stand and admire.

Purple Gallinules are warm-weather birds. Though some nest in the summer as far north as South Carolina, they winter in Florida and points south. So when a Purple Gallinule somehow found its way to the Nation’s capital this past January, the news shot through birding circles there as if royalty had come to town. A photo of the bird on the ledge of a high-rise building was blurred, but the Gallinule’s bluish-green feathers were unmistakable.

We didn’t get a glimpse of that Purple Gallinule, but when we left Washington last month for a birding trip to Florida, the Gallinule was high on the list of species we hoped to track down. We got lucky, and so we decided to make it our Flying Lessons Bird of the Week.

We’ve found Purple Gallinules several times between South and Central Florida, glimmering like Disney princesses when the sun hits their feathers. This is one colorful female whose feathers are exactly as fancy as those of its male counterpart.

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Washington Post story on eBird

IN-DEPTH STORY ON BIRDING

Here’s a package that ran in the Washington Post on how Cornell’s eBird project grew into the world’s most ambitious citizen science project. It’s an example of the in-depth coverage we do from time to time as part of our reporting on avian topics and trends.

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About us

We’re two journalists who’ve traded in our work in publishing and syndicated writing for following and photographing the birds. We live in Washington, DC, but are traveling the country every chance we get -- and are sharing the lessons birds are teaching us and the photos we take along the way.

Why Flying Lessons

This website is about what we can learn from the birds around us. Some of the lessons are obvious, such as the way birds can be a barometer of environmental changes. Others are subtle, like the way you, as an observer, have to adapt to navigate the world in which birds operate. We ourselves still have much to learn about birding, a late-in-life pursuit that has captivated us in retirement. But we decided to start writing about the lessons and teachings as we’re finding our way, in hopes that our storytelling and photography will help to celebrate a captivating element of nature.